I. Field
The following description relates generally to wireless communications, and more particularly to flow-based load balancing in a wireless communication environment.
II. Background
Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication; for instance, voice and/or data may be provided via such wireless communication systems. A typical wireless communication system, or network, can provide multiple users access to one or more shared resources. For instance, a system may use a variety of multiple access techniques such as Frequency Division Multiplexing (FDM), Time Division Multiplexing (TDM), Code Division Multiplexing (CDM), Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), and others.
Common wireless communication systems employ one or more base stations that provide a coverage area. A typical base station can transmit multiple data streams for broadcast, multicast and/or unicast services, wherein a data stream may be a stream of data that can be of independent reception interest to a mobile device. A mobile device within the coverage area of such base station can be employed to receive one, more than one, or all the data streams carried by the composite stream. Likewise, a mobile device can transmit data to the base station or another mobile device.
Each mobile device can communicate with one or more base stations via transmissions on forward and reverse links. Forward links (or downlinks) refer to communication links from base stations to mobile devices, and reverse links (or uplinks) refer to communication links from mobile devices to base stations. According to an example, a mobile device can connect to a wireless network over multiple links (e.g., uplinks and downlinks). Load balancing techniques oftentimes can be employed to spread data transfer loads across these multiple links. These load balancing techniques are commonly static in nature. For example, a round-robin packet by packet link selection can be utilized where a first packet traverses over a first link, a second packet traverses over a second link, a third packet traverses over a third link, and so forth. Further to this example, packets can be assigned to links in a manner without accounting for quality of the links. According to another illustration, hashing based selection can utilize an IP source/destination address without rebalancing on hashing collision. Thus, if most source/destination pairs hash onto a first link, minimal load balancing is provided. Pursuant to another example, conventional load balancing techniques can segment a packet into N different frames on one side of the link, and reassemble the frames at the other end. However, extra information is typically included in each frame in order to reconstruct the packet on the receiving side of the link. Thus, typical load balancing techniques oftentimes spread load unequally across links, fail to account for link quality (e.g., which commonly varies for wireless links), and/or transmit overhead data causing inefficient utilization of limited bandwidth.